Hi. I'm Jon Jagger.
I help software teams improve their effectiveness.
I built cyber-dojo, the place teams practice programming.
I'm based in the UK.
I've worked in 22 countries.
If you don't like my work, I won't invoice you.
Hire me

…in order to determine the consistency of any new system we must construct or uncover another system beyond it… One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.

If I design a system with no regard for the universe that surrounds it, I will have scanty knowledge of what can impact it. That is not a formula for success. To fit my system in to the larger system of systems around it, I must go to the next higher level of recursion, which is a frame of reference that encompasses my system and its environment—that is, the systems around it. What is involved is not simply survival of the fittest, but survival of the fitting-in-est, of that which fits in best.

Ignoring feedback merely means that the system will eventually experience a massive unpleasant surprise rather than a small unpleasant surprise.

The Red Queen's Race is an evolutionary hypothesis describing that a complex system needs continuous improvement to simply maintain its current fitness, relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. Some scientists claim that the Red Queen's Race, or the principle of co-evolving species, is an even more important driver of evolution that any other kind of environmental change.

Jerry warns us that when a system that continues to change or that is in a changing environment is subjected to a fixed set of tests, it will inevitably over-adapt to those tests, leading to a higher probability of severe or surprising failures in the field. [James Bach]

I have become enormously skeptical of simple cause-and-effect explanations of any system behavior. [Tim Lister]

The essential properties of a system taken as a whole derive from the interactions of its parts, not their actions taken separately. Therefore, when a system is taken apart it loses its essential properties. Because of this - and this is the critical point - a system is a whole that cannot be understood by analysis.

An organisation is a system whose major deficiencies arise from the ways its parts interact, not from their actions taken separately.